


i'll wear your jawbone round my neck

by the sarcophagus (Disguise_of_Carnivorism)



Series: memetics [1]
Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: AU, Blood, Dead People, F/M, I really don't know what happened here, Napoleonic Wars, Patricia A. McKillip inspired, etc etc - Freeform, non-graphic rough sex?, this is what happens when I try to do memes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-13
Updated: 2013-06-13
Packaged: 2017-12-14 20:25:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/841020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Disguise_of_Carnivorism/pseuds/the%20sarcophagus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ares runs out of wars. Aphrodite does something about it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i'll wear your jawbone round my neck

**Author's Note:**

> For the "3-sentence" tumblr meme: Ares and Aphrodite during the Napoleonic Wars?

She knew how to speak all the languages of love, to metamorphose her body into a living tongue that spoke only to desire. His language was war, muscles ripped to shreds with exertion, every moment made on the edge of fear, blood dripping from kisses like saliva. This was the violence that crawled under his skin, burned in his spirit. She knew this. So when he came to her, hands stained with blood, eyes raging, and told her that he had rolled heads across the final battlefield and strewn organs through its muds, had laid low the final people, she knew what he asked for. She would give him what he needed. She was, after all, Love.

So she found him a new war. She lurked in shops of magical sundries and traveled to ancient stone places that blood magic through their cracks. She charm-annoyed Hades into loaning her books of underworld magics; she upturned the earth itself in search of a new frontier, a new battlefield. And finally, in the eye sockets of a creaking, ancient sorceress’s remains, she found a way.

So she called him. As always, he came. She lifted the dagger to her palm and sliced a thin line of dripping red, looked him in the eyes, and said, “Take my hand,” and there was a passion in her voice that spoke with magics darker than either of them had ever touched before.

Their blood mingled and the world turned black. It folded in on them, devoured them, twisted them in burning cold hands and broke each and every one of their bones to splinters. Together their bodies screamed, shattered piece by piece—until the pressure eased and their eyes opened in a new world.

“What the hell did you  _do_?” Ares turned on her, eyes stricken, hands grasping futilely at her shoulders.

Aphrodite smiled, and cast her hands towards the mudfields around them. “Only what you asked, my love.”

And—because she was love and she loved war, she had, indeed, given him what his body had asked, for around them men died by the dozens, taken to pieces by weapons that thundered like Zeus’s storms. Ares took what he wanted. They fell like ants before him, hundreds splayed in a single blow. He tore limb from limb and struck man from horse and toppled generals with one hand. Blood beaded on his brow like sweat, and death veiled his eyes. Aphrodite never left him, pristine and brutal at death’s right hand. The men who died at his hand remembered only hell and war, and believed that the ground itself had risen against them, bloody, with an angel shining by his side, ready to lead them away.

And soon, it was done.

Men lay between death, uniforms unable to protect them from the horrors of divinity. Fallen horses kicked limply, tongues lolling, eyes bulging.

Two gods stood on a human battlefield. The mud squelched sickly beneath their feet, running red with the blood of thousands not meant to die. Together the gods rewrote human history, that day; together, they were terrifying,

Ares looked at her, his face a red-streaked mask of death, and he smiled. Aphrodite, red only with the blood that seeped from the black-magic wound on her palm, smiled back.

And then his body was a living hurricane of violence, a storm bred to tear weapons from hands and splatter blood across the ground; so her body became that ground, the enemies that snarled and fought and lived, and gave him exactly what he desired—her teeth on his tongue, her nails in his back. She made him scream until his groans could not be distinguished from the weak keens of the dying.

When they finished, her knuckles ached with bruises and her handprints pained his wrists with all the pretty colors. Ares wiped his own blood from his mouth—the first of his that had been shed that day—threw back his head, and there, as they lay together in the muck of the dead, threw back his head and laughed. Aphrodite kissed him once more and grinned, teeth gleaming sharp and white. And around them lay the rotting children of love and war.


End file.
